Service Offerings for agreed service management and support arrangements

[FP1234]

I'm new to CSDM and looking for some real-world advice from those who may have implemented a similar approach. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

We are a central IT group within a large non-IT organisation. Our central IT group provides IT services to business areas within the organisation and many of these areas have their own IT teams. To formalise ongoing service management and support arrangements, we previously documented agreements in Word - basically what we would do in support of a specific business system and what the customer would do e.g. we would provide incident management and they would provide service desk. As you can imagine, there are a lot of limitations around this approach - particularly around consistency across agreements and in reporting.

We have recently moved to a much-improved approach based on leveraging CSDM/CMDB within ServiceNow. We have created two portfolios of business service offerings (one for our group and one for not-our group), business services based on the ITIL management practices as categories,  and then defined service offerings for the aspects of the ongoing arrangements e.g. service desk - business hours, service desk - 24 hours, incident management - full, incident management - supporting services only etc.

We then use a Depends On relationship to relate the required service offerings to an ICT Service (cmdb_ci_service) to define the formalised arrangements. This has allowed us to standardise each offering, manage the offerings through a structured process (as per any other CI), and effectively report on what we do for specific systems.

The organisation is now moving to adopt CSDM more broadly (we are the only user of CSDM service offerings at the moment), so I'm keen to make sure our approach isn't going to cause issues, so was hoping for some thoughts on:

* Using Business Service Offerings to define ongoing service management and support arrangements

* Relating a business service offering to a business application or application service (haven't decided the best approach yet) using a Depends On relationship i.e. ICT Service Depends On Business Service Offering  -- we note this is the reverse of the OOB relationship for these two. We are currently relating the offerings to the ICT Service but this will change as business applications are defined as part of the CSDM adoption more broadly.

Thanks in advance!

[mikesisson · Accepted solution]

Congrats @FP1234 on your maturity journey.  Sounds like you have some small tweaks to make.  The best step forward that you can make is to start using Service Builder... NOW!  This way you don't have to worry about the relationships as they are taken care of for you.  You will certainly want the Service Offering to Depend on the App Service and NOT the Business Application (The Application Service has a relationship to the Business Application.  I would make those changes now before you bring other on.  Then when  you build your Business Services and Offerings, the Service Builder will ask you which Application Service you depend on.  This will build the correct relationships.  This also sets you up for scaling and allowing others to create their own services and offerings.  You can still govern by being the approvers when changes are made within service builder.

Embrace Service Builder....  It will save you tech debt down the road!

[Damhoej]

just a small note on Service Builder. The offerings you create in Service Builder is meant to be used in Service Portfolio Management. They are not selectable for a Service Instance through the UI for Service Instances (unless SN has corrected that bug). 

When I get access to my PDI again I will test if it still is an issue.

[Damhoej]

And I finally got my PDI back.

They have fixed the issue so using Service Builder is the recommended way.

[FP1234]

Thanks for the reply Mike, but we are using it for a slightly different purpose (i.e. not as designed OOB) so Service Builder won't work for us.

We are using service offerings related to an application service to describe an ongoing support arrangement for that system e.g.

Application X depends on Service Desk - Full - Business Hours
Application X depends on Incident Management - Full  
Application X depends on Application Management - Full - Business Hours
Application X depends on User Training - Business Hours (Customer)
etc.

Just leveraging, with some poetic license, the CMDB and CSDM entities to build out agreed support arrangements between us and the customer for each app. Gets us away from having to put these in a Word Document and also allows us to benefit from it being structured data in the CMDB rather than free text in a Word document.